Proms 61 & 63: BBC Singers/BBC SO, Royal Albert Hall, London

Chalk and cheese

In the penultimate week of a Proms season that has been rather patchy for new music, two modernist composers of the middle generation were featured. As it happened, both their works were inspired by plainchant. Simon Bainbridge's Chant, given its London premiere by the BBC Singers and the City of London Sinfonia conducted by Stephen Cleobury, was written in 1999 for the BBC's "Sounding the Millennium" project. The composer uses a hymn by Hildegard of Bingen as a springboard to take his own characteristically expressive vocal style and vivid instrumental imagination along new paths.

Yet, whatever evocative marvels may have been achieved in its York Minster premiere, the performance in the late-night Prom last Wednesday fell very flat. This was due partly, I think, to the unyielding, often highly fragmentary obtuseness with which Bainbridge alternates Hildegard's unadorned melody with sometimes bizarrely over- ornamented dissonant decorations and dogged drones, and partly to the less than subtle amplification of the 12 voices as they were tossed around the Royal Albert Hall by a host of loudspeakers.

The French composer Marc-André Dalbavie's Color, receiving its British premiere at the hands of the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Christoph Eschenbach, was written last year for the Orchestre de Paris and its conductor here.

In building his work on a single melody, strung out in long pedal notes, Dalbavie is moving towards a more melodic and apparently tonal conception of music while remaining true to the concern, with sound exploration fundamental to the so-called "spectral" approach of his earlier output. So the glistening D minor of the opening instigates a fascinating new take on a familiar harmonic world, probed with the aid of this composer's already well-established brilliant orchestrational skills.

This music of dark as well as brilliant harmonies, of little scale patterns, repeated notes and glissandi as well as blazes of brass and almost Debussian soundscapes, unfolds in a quite complex but entirely compelling structure before returning, more or less, whence it came. Can we please hear more Dalbavie in concerts soon?

The programme launched by Color on Friday was typical of this Proms season in mixing chalk and cheese for no apparent reason. But the inclusion of Barber's Violin Concerto, played by Midori with drama and astonishing timbral variety, and Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony ensured that the Dalbavie was heard by a large audience, too.

And the Tchaikovsky showed that the BBC SO, which is not exactly covering itself in glory this season, can be galvanised by the right conductor into playing of real precision and passion.

A pity that Eschenbach's recently announced appointment in Philadelphia presumably precludes him from being considered for this orchestra's chief conductorship.